Author: Dan Seeger

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One for Friday: Lyle Lovett, “Step Inside This House”

Dan Seeger

I have enough invested in the idea of perfect artistic finality that occasionally I can drift into the mental parlor game of selecting the best last album for an individual artist. This doesn’t necessarily mean identifying their very best work under the theory that everyone should go out at their absolute peak. Instead, it’s about finding those releases that feel just right as a sort of summation, a proper closing statement of artistic identity and intent. To shift the topic to movies for a useful illustration, Robert Altman probably made at least a dozen movies that I consider plainly better … Continue reading One for Friday: Lyle Lovett, “Step Inside This House”

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Top 40 Smash Taps: “Livin’ in the Life”

Dan Seeger

These posts are about the songs that can accurately claim to crossed the key line of chart success, becoming Top 40 hits on Billboard, but just barely. Every song featured in this series peaked at number 40. As 1977 began, the Isley Brothers could claim a total of nine Top 40 hits across their fifteen years as a charting artist, beginning with the seminal “Shout,” which reached the Top 20 in 1962, and climbing all the way to #4 as recently as two years earlier, with “Fight the Power (Part 1).” That year, the line-up consisted of actual siblings Ernie, … Continue reading Top 40 Smash Taps: “Livin’ in the Life”

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From the Archive: Once Around

Dan Seeger

The earliest months of the film year are brutally hard to get through. The problem is lessened by the quality offerings from the prior calendar year that dribble into smaller markets in fits and starts, but most films that get their initial, often widespread release in the months January and February (and even into the spring) are largely the weaker material that studios felt couldn’t compete in Oscar season or weren’t worth holding back for the highly charged summer season. That’s still the case, but it was even more pronounced back in the early nineteen-nineties, before the release schedule started … Continue reading From the Archive: Once Around

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One for Friday: Robyn Hitchcock, “One Long Pair of Eyes (Live at Cat’s Cradle Back Room)”

Dan Seeger

Like a lot of college radio kids, I was a fairly dedicated concertgoer for a time. I wasn’t one of those who jumped at nearly every opportunity, nor was I especially adventurous, hitting the clubs to hear bands I wasn’t all that familiar with (I will regret to the end of my days that I didn’t see Sleater-Kinney with the White Stripes opening up at a dinky club in Madison way back when). But I had a respectable number of torn tickets shoved into CD cases and record sleeves. That’s waned enough in the past several years that the first … Continue reading One for Friday: Robyn Hitchcock, “One Long Pair of Eyes (Live at Cat’s Cradle Back Room)”